Sites of the Dictators

Memories of Authoritarian Europe, 1945–2020

Xosé M. Núñez Seixas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000397024
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa orientale

This book explores the changing evolution of memory debates on places intimately linked to the lives and deaths of different fascist, para-fascist and communist dictators in a truly transnational and comparative way.

During the second decade of the twenty-first century, a number of parallel debates arose in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Albania, Austria and other European countries regarding the public management by democratic regimes of those sites of memory that were directly linked to the personal biographies of their former dictators. The ways in which each democracy deals with the dead bodies, mausoleums and birthplaces of the dictators vary considerably, although common questions occur, such as whether oblivion or re-signification is better, the risk of a posthumous cult of personality being established and the extent to which the shadow of the authoritarian past endures in these sites of memory. Using the concept of "sites of the dictators", the author explains why it is so difficult to deal with some sites of memory linked to dead autocrats, as those places contribute directly or indirectly to humanizing them, making their remembrance more acceptable for the present and future generations, and discusses the potential of the "Europeanization" of these "dark" memories of the past.

Exploring the imperatives of memory politics and how these are reconciled with local actors interested in exploiting the dictator's remembrance, this book will be useful reading for students and scholars of history, politics and memory studies.

1

Introduction: Sites of memory, sites of dictators

Spain, 2019. Two events marked the return of the memory of Francoism to current affairs. On the one hand, the legal action taken by the state solicitor’s general office against the descendants of the former dictator Francisco Franco in July of the same year, in order to return the manor house or country palace owned by Franco in Meirás (Sada, A Coruña) to state ownership. On the other hand, the transfer in October of the dictator’s mortal remains from the mausoleum from the Valley of the Fallen to the family vault located in Mingorrubio state cemetery (El Pardo, Madrid).

Both milestones seem to foreshadow the approaching end of Spanish exceptionality concerning the settling of scores with the dictatorial past. However, it is a process still subject to considerable vicissitudes, which partly depend on changes of parliamentary majorities and the political colour of governments. Undoubtedly, Spain continues to be different in more than one aspect from the Western European pattern of score settling with the dictatorial past, and the adoption of pro-active memory politics by public institutions. It is not so much the case if the specificities of the Spanish transition to democracy are taken into account, as well as the temporary mismatch (the dictatorship in Spain ended 30 years later than in other countries) in comparison with the democracies that followed the fascist or parafascist regimes in Western Europe in 1945. The pace of the putting into practice of memory policies by several of these States was also slow and contradictory, and in some cases did not begin to be effective until the 1980s. The degrees of intensity in the persistence of authoritarian legacies are also specific, according to each particular example.

However, the problematic management of sites of (un)memory linked in an intimate manner to the dictator’s biography is not an exclusively Spanish phenomenon. In the great majority of democracies that succeeded totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in Western Europe after 1945, and which were completed by the “third wave” of democratization (which started in Southern Europe in 1974, continued in South America in the 1980s and culminated as of 1990 in East-Central Europe), innumerable debates, uncertainties, sources of resistance and dilemmas regarding the sites of the dictators can be recorded.¹

From the outset, some conceptual clarifications are required. The terms “dictator” and “dictatorship” are employed in this monograph in a flexible sense. If the dictators of ancient Rome were magistrates invested temporarily with absolute power, dictatorship is a form of government in which the capability for decision, and therefore absolute power, is placed in the hands of a single person, a leader, or those of a small group of people. As Vladimir I. Lenin wrote, “Dictatorship means […] power with no constraints, and rule by force, not of law”.² The exercise of power by dictators may be arbitrary, based on coercion, and not respectful of any norms; however, dictatorships tend to settle their own legitimacy. Unlike democracies, there are no competitive elections: political pluralism is inexistent or very limited, as is also the mobilization of civil society. Only from above, through single parties and organizations depending directly on the pinnacle of power, can mass mobilization occur, in order to endorse or accompany the directions emanating from the top. Unlike the great majority of nineteenth-century forms of autocratic governance, from Bonapartisms to Latin American caudillismos, the dictatorships of the twentieth century were mostly characterized by their mid- and long-term aim at standardizing the entirety of the social body. Their devices were a single political party and mass organizations, state intervention, the control of the media and a defined worldview that served as an overall inspiration.

At the head of a dictatorship was a leader whose legitimacy came from charisma. Drawing on the classic distinction established by the sociologist Juan J. Linz, authoritarian dictatorships granted less weight to ideology, did not entirely control the armed forces, the economy or public opinion and tolerated the existence of a limited political pluralism. On the contrary, totalitarian regimes, at least in the mid- and long term, would not allow the co-existence within their domain of autonomous spheres of power or levels of governance, from the army to social corporations and religious churches. They would also aim at a social engineering that was comprehensive in scope: a long-term utopia, in which society would be moulded according to a clear-cut ideological pattern.³

A greater variety of situations would therefore fit within that flexible concept of dictatorship. The cast would encompass temporary military dictatorships, with partial or complete suspension of constitutional rights, and those based on a single party and a fledgling ideological project, as well as paternalist autocracies, characterized by the pre-eminence of executive power under the charge of a charismatic ruler, but retaining a formally democratic political system. However, a dictatorship can often evolve from being one kind to another, begin as authoritarian presidentialism or with a military coup to become in time a project that is totalitarian in nature and determined to retain power.⁴

An essential figure in every dictatorship is the person at the top. The dictator, in the masculine: they were all men, although at times their spouses also undertook a certain role in the exercise and practice of power.⁵ The person who was not held accountable, and did not have to give any explanations concerning his exercise of power to any higher authority. Still, several of them (such as Mussolini or Salazar) co-existed with traditional figures, whether kings or presidents of the Republic, who almost always possessed a representative or nominal role. But this was not a major constraint for the dictators’ unlimited rule.

The main source of the dictator’s power is charisma. In the classic definition of Max Weber, charisma is a legitimization of non-bureaucratic and non-traditional power, establishing that a person is assumed to be invested with supernatural, superhuman or simply exceptional qualities that are not accessible to everyone. They could express themselves both through the “hypnotic” capability by a determined individual to generate unconditional adhesion and unleash passionate feelings in his followers, and through a specific person’s ability to establish a particular relationship with the sources of power. The charisma of an individual can therefore be associated with the role he/she performs, or with his/her privileged capacity to establish an exceptional relationship with his/her followers. However, in order to endure, even the most archetypal and charismatic power requires, sooner or later, a (bureaucratic) routinization, and/or they resort to complementary sources of traditional legitimation, such as the appeal to the fatherland, religion or, simply, the connection with the past: the recourse for history.⁶

An additional problem occurs with succession: what happens to the dictator’s charisma after his death? The body of the majority of the dictators inherited the role of the sovereign’s body in the Ancien Régime (Old Regime): the “king’s two bodies”, the physical and the symbolic, represented the right to rule and sovereignty, whose legacy was transmitted to his successor and guaranteed the continuity of the monarchy, and with it that of the entire political community.⁷ The royal and imperial dynasties until 1914/18 developed elaborate rituals through which succession occurred. The king’s body was buried in a crypt or vault, but now as simple remains deprived of their symbolic role. The funeral rite of the Hapsburg dynasty from the eighteenth century, each time that a deceased monarch or prince entered the vault of the Capuchin Crypt in Vienna, highlighted this quality. Only when an aide accounted that a “humble sinner” requested entry to the crypt, and not the emperor with all his bombastic titles, was the corpse admitted to the vault. The royal past is always collective.

However, from 1917 on the abrupt end of the last pre-modern empires, and especially the Russian revolution, a new model of funeral rite for the head of state was introduced. The first was Vladimir I. Lenin, when he passed away in January 1924. The second was Dr. Sun Yat-sen, president of the young Chinese Republic, a year later. They were not dictators in the strict sense that would be current some years later: even Lenin, who despite imposing an iron dictatorship that disregarded any democratic control, and enjoying an undisputable authority, tended to act as a primus inter pares. However, their deaths, massively attended state funerals and the posthumous cult to their remembrance that was inaugurated by their regimes, marked a clear break with the old dynastic world of collective tombs and regal vaults. They would also have their own secularized tumulus, which became the symbol of a new political legitimacy, putting an end to the dynastic monopoly of the royal pantheons.

This can be clearly seen in the Soviet case. On the night following the death of Lenin, the government of the USSR tasked a renowned architect, the constructivist Aleksey V. Shchusev, with the design of a specific mausoleum. Shchusev sketched a cubic and staggered motif of great formal sobriety, which combined a message of eternity (the cube as a perennial geometrical metaphor) and secular classicism, taking its inspiration from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. He therefore created a provisional wooden design in 1924, which in 1929–1930 was substituted by another one, made of steel and concrete and covered in granite, after considering several models that oscillated between grandiosity and revolutionary sobriety. Inaugurated on 7 November 1930, on the anniversary of the revolution, the embalmed body of Lenin would be on permanent display within, with the intention of converting the site into a revolutionary pilgrimage centre. The early condemnations by the Bolsheviks of embalming as an obscurantist Christian practice, including Lenin’s criticisms towards the ‘canonization’ of dead revolutionaries and his own widow’s opposition to the project, were soon forgotten.⁸

The cult of Lenin’s body, alongside the codification of the term Marxism-Leninism by his successor, Josef Stalin, to define it as the Marxist doctrine of the time of imperialism and war, was completed with the erection of statues in the central square of each soviet city, often re-using the plinths that in 1913 had been placed to erect the sculptures of tsar Nicholas II. In the following years, the cult of the Bolshevik leader would follow many of the traditional guidelines that had oriented the worship of Russian saints and the figure of the tsar years before. Likewise, several museums were devoted to Lenin’s remembrance. Yet only on the occasion of the centenary of his birth (1970) was a great museum devoted to Lenin’s life inaugurated in the town where he was born, Ulianovsk (900 kilometres east of Moscow), as well as another one in the Siberian town Shushenskoye, where he lived for three years as an exile (1897–1900).⁹

Lenin’s cult undoubtedly set a precedent, a pattern that would be reproduced in subsequent decades. Whether his regime would continue or die with him, the modern autocrat’s body possessed the foundational vocation of setting a new order, and marking a new beginning. It was equally the depositary of a transferred and secularized sacredness, which could range from thaumaturgical qualities up to the ability attributed to his images of bringing luck to a home, avoid misfortune and cause unusual, almost miraculous events.¹⁰ It was a question of his own charisma, anointed by extraordinary powers, which he continued to exercise after death in the background, often for decades, upon public opinion, social mindsets and the memory politics of the democracies that followed him. This transfer was possible only within specific cultural and social frameworks, in which the charisma of autocrats established a fluid and lasting interaction with the “active centres” of social order, the points at which ideas and institutions intersected, attending to concerns and craving for legitimacy from the bottom up, but also shaping them from above. Ultimately, the “genius” or charisma of the dictator also depended on the extent to which his followers were able to ascribe him that exceptional quality, and were prepared to do so.¹¹

In this sense, it could be stated that if kings, heads of government or of state attribute their charisma to the continuity of a role and an institutional position, dictators are always, by definition, exceptional people. For this reason, they depend above all else upon the brilliance of their personality, their leadership skills and even “hypnotic” qualities. But those qualities, and therefore that charisma, are also consciously crafted from above. They may be the result of an attribution to their leadership of exceptional qualities, in accordance with the cultural and social context in which dictators exercise power. The twentieth-century dictatorship is also a modern personality cult, forged in and for a mass society, whose source of legitimacy was national sovereignty, as well as direct contact with the people (or “the masses”), which become routinized through the massive spread of images and unquestioned slogans. This is facilitated by the unrestricted control of the media.

Furthermore, and as occurred in several of the cases referred to in this book, the posthumous attribution of charisma to a dictator is favoured or strengthened by the circumstances of his death: assassination, exile, execution by an enemy, and so on.¹² Last, but not least, charisma can be reinforced through the association between an individual and the destiny of a nation. If the dictator embodied moreover the foundation of an independent state, which was the culmination of a lengthy national mobilization, his figure was endowed with additional legitimization from the nation, and from nationalism as a political religion. He thus became a founding father, or a restorer of the homeland’s freedom. This category would transform him from autocrat into national hero for the generations to come after his death.

After death, the dictator’s body could leave behind a broad literary and media footprint, or simply a lasting deposit in popular memory.¹³ However, this was always particularly linked with specific spaces: the place where he was born, private abodes where he lived and/or exercised his power or the sites where his remains lie. These might include his tomb, vault or mausoleum, a term that alludes originally to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: the sumptuous sepulchre of King Mausolus from Halicarnassus in the fourth century BC. On occasions, this also encompasses the specific place where the autocrat died, above all if his death was violent and, therefore, could be interpreted as martyrdom f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Sites of memory, sites of dictators
• 2 The sites of the fascist dictators
• 3 The sites of the authoritarian and collaborationist dictators
• 4 Is Spain different? The many sites of the Caudillo
• 5 The sites of the Communist dictators
• 6 Epilogue: What should be done with the sites of dictators?
• 7 Bibliography
• Index